John Nichols was raised by a family as American as the Stars and Stripes.

He enjoyed a top-notch private school education and at 23 wrote a best-selling novel, The Sterile Cuckoo. At that point, he considered himself "a child blessed by the culture and fated for delirious success."

However, a trip to Guatemala derailed his golden-child existence and set him on a very different path toward social and environmental activism. This book charts Nichols's rich and often tormented journey out of his sheltered middle-class life toward a belief in what he calls "liberation ecology."